PARIS -
The refusal of Mir Hoseyn Moussavi, the Iranian prime minister during
his country's war with Iraq, to become
the candidate of the beleaguered reformists in the next
presidential elections has thrown the movement into
further disarray.
With
President Mohammad Khatami's second and last term in office ending next
June, the reformist movement had identified Moussavi as
the best hope of regaining some of its lost credibility
with the public, which feels let down by Khatami and the
reformists. Moussavi, a left-leaning
intellectual, put an end to months of intense lobbying by leaders
of the Second Khordad Coalition (SKC) - made up of
18 groups, organizations and parties that backed Khatami
in the 1997 presidential elections, leading to his
landslide and surprise victory - when he made it clear
that he refused the nomination.
"Unfortunately, Mr Moussavi, the prime minister from the glorious
[grand ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini era, has refused to be
a candidate in the presidential elections," said
Mehdi Karroubi, the Speaker of the former majlis
(parliament) that was dominated by the reformists at the end of a
two-hour meeting in the presence of leaders of the
coalition, including Khatami.
Though
Karroubi did not explain why Moussavi had rejected the offer,
the most plausible reason is the one given by
Elaaheh Koola'i, a former outspoken reformist lawmaker, who
says the former premier did not want to "experience what
has already been experienced", referring to a popular
Persian proverb.
Sitting on the executive board of
the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF), the country's
biggest political formation led by Dr Mohammad Reza
Khatami, the president's younger brother, Koola'i, who
is also a university professor, said, "The experience
lived by Mr Khatami, the obstacles placed on the road of
reforms by the opponents [conservatives], the traumas
the last majlis was subjected to and the way the new
hardline-controlled parliament treats the government all
forms a picture clear enough to make up Mr Moussavi's
mind."
She was referring to the impeachment of
roads and transport minister Ahmad Khorram on charges of
mismanagement, corruption and abuse of power, and a law
that requires the government to get prior authorization
from the majlis for all major deals it signs with
foreign firms, to name some of the humiliation Khatami
has suffered at the hands of the current
conservative-dominated parliament.
"The
political situation of the nation is such that the
president has no field to fulfill the minimum of his
prerogatives," added Jamileh Kadivar, the secretary
general of Women Journalists of Iran.
For
most analysts, if Moussavi, 63, enjoys certain
popularity it is because Iranians remember him as the
man who during the difficult period of Iran's bloody war
with Iraq in the 1980s and international isolation due
to the victory of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 kept
prices more or less stable and corruption at a minimum
level.
"Faced with an unseen level of corruption
among the ruling clerics and their families, the
widening gap between the rich and the poor,
skyrocketing prices, widespread prostitution and
rampant injustice, ordinary Iranians are nostalgic for
the time when Moussavi was in charge," one journalist
pointed out.
But Moussavi's success can also be
attributed to the constant and firm backing he enjoyed
from the grand ayatollah Khomeini, the founding father of
the Islamic Republic, giving him a free hand in running
the country's daily affairs.
At one point, when
Moussavi had serious clashes with the president, then
Ali Khamenei, Khomeini leaped to the defense of the prime
minister, forbidding the president from interfering in
the daily affairs of the government, a humiliation
Khamenei never forgot.
However, Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani scrapped the post of prime minister
when he became president in 1989 under Khamenei as the
leader, replacing Khomeini, who died in August the same
year of a heart attack.
Badly defeated in the
last legislative elections, rejected by the population
because of their failure in fulfilling the limited
reforms they had promised and their constant retreat in
the face of the conservatives, the coalition of official
reformists had pinned all their hopes on Moussavi,
mostly because he had almost no role in the now
discredited reform movement.
"The eight years of
Khatami's presidency has proven that although the
president is, according to the constitution, the second
personage of the system [after Supreme Leader Khamenei],
but the distance between his powers with those of the
leader and the non-elected institutions depending on the
leader is so great that the post and job of presidency
is lowered to the rank of a logistic clerk," Akhbar Rouz
(Daily News) noted.
Although Moussavi has made
it known that he is one of the reformists, he does not
share their preoccupations, with some of them flagging
fundamental differences with Moussavi on economic,
cultural and even political matters. Also, the
experiences of the past 16 years have proved that under
the present system of velayate motlaqeh faqih ,
or the rule of the absolute leader, the position of
president is a euphemism, if not a joke.
"Who can
pretend he would succeed where Khatami, with the immense
popularity he used to enjoy and supported by more than
25 million of voters, was not able to implement one
single item of the limited social, economic and cultural
reforms he had promised?" one scholar asked, adding that
the big difference between the two men is that "Khatami
is like a bamboo that bends to any wind, capable of
accepting any humiliation and insults, while Moussavi
looks more like an oak, a man of solid principles and
uncompromising".
In 1979, Moussavi was picked by
students as the leading candidate to run against Ali
Akbar Nateq Nouri, then Speaker of the majlis and the
conservatives' choice, backed also by the leader. But he
declined the proposal after Ayatollah Khamenei ruled him
out, opening the way for the then much lesser-known
personality, Khatami, a former minister of Islamic
guidance and culture.
However, many analysts say
that in the present situation in Iran and its position
in the world (nuclear controversy), Moussavi is "the
most untypical, if not the worst" candidate the
reformists could find to represent them in the next
presidential race.
"The picture of Iranian
society has dramatically changed since the difficult
but heroic time when Moussavi, with the firm backing of
Khomeini, was a real prime minister. Being out of touch
and mummified in a way, somehow, he is a typical French
cafe intellectual of the 1960s, when it was good to have
Mao [Zedong]'s famous red book in his pocket, still
favoring a state-controlled economy and revolutionary
ideals in a modern time of liberalism," commented Masoud
Behnoud, an Iranian journalist and political analyst.
"Maybe one of the reasons Mr Moussavi refused
the accept the candidacy is because he realizes that the
world's situation has changed since the time when he was
prime minister," confirmed Mohammad Bani Habibi, the
general secretary of the Islamic Associations Party,
formerly the League of Islamic Associations, the shadowy
and powerful group that is believed to control most of
the ruling clerics from behind the scenes.
As
noted by Akhbar Rouz, the SKC chose Moussavi to
guarantee its presence in the establishment. "In fact,
many of the Second Khordad Coalition, including the two
largest of them, have, in the course of time, become
divorced from the ideas defended by the former prime
minister."
"Reformists' insistence on Moussavi
was like using a drug whose use has expired," pointed
out Bizhan Safsari in the popular Iranian Internet site
Gooya.
At the same time, the same pundits agree
that Moussavi's refusal to take the candidacy can be
translated as a protest against Iran's present
situation, hence several pro-reform personalities
calling on him to explain his decision publicly.
"Moussavi must come out and tell the people why
he has rejected the candidacy. By doing so he can help
open the eyes of the people to the realities of the
regime," one journalist suggested.
"The decision
of Moussavi is an alarm bell for both Iranian society
and the regime, for it shows that people with certain
potential are not willing to come forward," warned
Mohammad Salamati, general secretary of the Islamic
Revolution Mojaheden's Organization, an influential and
well-organized group of the official reformists, talking
to ISNA, the news agency that strongly promoted the
former premier for the presidency.
While
Internet news site Baztab, which belongs to Mohsen
Reza'i, the secretary of the Assembly for Discerning the
Interest of the State (ADIS, or the Expediency Council)
headed by Rafsanjani, says "in order to be credible, the
next presidential elections must be popular with the
participation of more than 25 million voters", political
analysts agree that with the absence of Moussavi, the
"exact opposite" will happen.
The least one can
say is that Moussavi's decision seriously jeopardizes
the future of the almost defunct SKC, heralding its
explosion, as each of the coalition's groups will now
have to look for its own candidate at a time that the
conservatives are determined to also conquer the bastion
of the presidency after capturing the majlis in
February.
While, according to analysts, the
pro-reform Association of Combatant Clergymen and some
other smaller groups would very probably turn to
Karroubi as their candidate, the IIPF leans toward
Mostafa Mo'in, the minister of higher education.
Moussavi's withdrawal from the presidential race
also highlights rifts in the conservative camp, which is
as divided as the reformists.
On the one hand,
the hardliners prefer former Revolutionary Guard turned
politicians such as Ali Larijani, the former head of the
conservative-controlled Radio and Television
Organization, and Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad, the present
mayor of Tehran. On the other hand, the so-called
moderate conservatives favor experienced civil servants
such as Ali Akbar Velayati, the former foreign affairs
minister, and Hasan Rohani, the secretary of the Supreme
Council for National Security and Iran's senior
negotiator on nuclear affairs.
This will
leave Rafsanjani, the former president, as the most
"eligible" of all candidates, having strong support in both
the conservative and reformist camps of the
Iranian theocratic establishment. However, the big problem
with Rafsanjani, the only politician to have been present
on the Iranian political scene since the victory of
the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and for this reason
many Iranians consider him a "savior", is too big for Ali
Shah (the nickname Iranians have bestowed on Ayatollah
Khamenei because of his poor imitation of the former
monarch's imperial attitudes) to handle, analysts noted.
According to some unconfirmed reports, the
majlis, presided over by Qolam'ali Haddad Adel, a close
family friend of the leader, is already preparing a law
preventing the former president from running again for
presidency.
A president likely to
accommodate Khamenei must be someone with no political
ambitions, believing blindly in the system of absolute rule of
the leader, and with some administrative experience.
The mayor of Tehran and the former general director of the
Voice and Visage (Radio and Television), who also have
the advantage of having served with the Revolutionary
Guards, are the archetype of the future head of the
executive.
Safa Haeri is a Paris-based
Iranian journalist covering the Middle East and Central
Asia.
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